Free Will and Determinism in the Debates Between Analytic Philosophy and Neuroscience

A common approach to the question of Free Will in contemporary philosophy is comprised of the following ideas: (i) the kind of Free Will of which we have a common experience is an illusion, and (ii) if there is any way to find a place for Free Will in a naturalistic framework, it must be a kind of freedom that is compatible with necessity. In the history of philosophy, Spinoza is the first who defended this combination of views. In contemporary debates, it is represented by some analytic “compatibilist” philosophers, who consider that the data from empirical science – especially neuroscience – in favour of Determinism rule out any “incompatibilist” (or “libertarian”) conception. The goal of this paper is to situate the recent neuroscientific data in favour of Determinism in the context of the analytical debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. This will allow me to show why some contemporary philosophers (including myself) consider that these empirical data have not absolutely refuted the possibility of a libertarian conception of Free Will and the reliability of our common experience.